Now that the mixed metaphor is out of the way, apparently someone is upset that I compared sacred Marxism with the far right the other day.
The easiest way to make my point is by saying my moment of revelation came the second I realized that any of the millions of people murdered by Stalin were as murdered as any of the people murdered by Hitler. And the same was true of those murdered by Mao and those murdered by any of the myriad fascist regimes supported by the United States during the 1950s and 60s. That the brutal, murdering puppet governments set up in the Eastern European countries under the banner of Marxism were as much violent occupation governments as the Central American or Iranian corporate-fascist dictatorships set up under the CIA. In short, I'd broken through the damnably amoral and so immoral, not to mention entirely absurd, identification of alleged political positioning based on abstract economic theory as expounded in universities and learned texts and looked at the mountains of bodies of real people really murdered as if they were who really mattered.
The real measure of a governments worthiness of existing or being overturned and replaced is their propensity to prevent instead of produce murder victims. The dead of Lenin, Stalin Mao, ... and even up to the merely relatively less bad Castro stared me straight in the eye as horrifyingly as those of Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, the fascist dictatorships supported by the United States, Britain, France, etc.
And with that came the insight that different systems of economics were only important the extent to which they produced economic justice because the distribution of wealth is also a means by which governments and societies and, increasingly under the regime of corporate fascism developing here, corporate fiefdoms, kill and enslave people for the benefits of elites. It is the difference between them killing and enslaving people or The People instituting the forms of everyday justice when life isn't in immediate crisis. And history proves that it is only government of The people, by The People and for The People which will produce justice in anything like an equal distribution, just as it proves that the proposed alternative of Marxism will not. Marxism will not because it, as an atheistic system, lacks sufficient belief in or respect for the moral imperatives that underlie even the concept of justice. Any system, atheistic or non-atheistic that denies or ignores those moral imperatives will never produce a just society, those neither believe in nor produce equal justice, legal and economic, which is the only thing that holds together a society in peace sufficient to get the body count down.
Those insights were bound to have an effect, first and foremost in looking, hard, at the political positions I'd taken for almost all of my adult life. Though the nuclear standoff and the truly awful things that the corporate American state under the elite that ran it also informed those, the body counts amassed by"leftist" rule should have shown me that they were nothing to believe in, either. Ignoring that made me as complicit in those deaths as any fascist is. And I won't be that, not any more. Not even for all of those colorful, legendary, lovable lefties we are all supposed to love as we all ignore those corpses together.
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In the United States, today, I see an increasing descent into fascism, largely by means of Supreme Court rulings that purposely increase the paranoia of the beleaguered white underclass which the Supreme Court is purposely arming to the teeth. As I have often pointed out to my fellow would-be leftists, those arsenals aren't being amassed without thought of using them against people, us, to be exact. In that the Roberts and the Rehnquist courts are recapitulating the old pattern of the oligarchic elite, playing one part of the underclass of against another part of it, most typically along racial lines, first, but also along class lines. The traditional white underclass who are their pawns make the irrational calculation that they will benefit more from not fighting the oligarchs but hope for a bigger share of what they leave to be struggled over among the lower classes. White men, in particular, are the pawns of the oligarchs, instructed by hate-talk radio and cabloid TV in who to hate and how and to buy more guns and ammo, under the "free speech-free press" permission given to them by the Supreme Courts and the Ivy law school elites who have made that the most effective tool in setting up this scenario.
I am becoming more convinced that the Roberts court may, actually, be the worst court in our history. Some believe that the horrible Taney court that produced the truly evil Dred Scott decision was afraid of initiating a civil war, though I think it was unlikely they would have abolished slavery even if that wouldn't be a necessary hell to pass through for the slave power to be defeated. Today's court, with that historical example is creating the conditions that not only risk a far more horrific civil war, not one largely restricted to fighting by standing armies but by general insurrection in the civilian population, with modern, automatic weapons and explosives. The perfumed men and woman - Sandra Day O'Connor - who have produced this danger are some of the most dangerous people ever to hold office in our government, in the entirely undemocratic Supreme Court appointed, not elected, confirmed by the least democratic part of our government, the Senate. I think the logic of the greatest danger to democracy arising from that least democratic of bodies, staffed with lawyers trained at the training schools of the elite, the Ivies, is clear. That several of them belong to a fascist cult, nominally Catholic, but which is far more in line with some kind of anti-Christ philosophy than the teachings of Jesus, is pretty much a distraction from where the real danger lies*,
And in that effort they have had no greater assistance than from those pseudo-leftists who handed them the cult of the First Amendment, free speech absolutism without regard for the truth, free press without the absolute requirement that it doesn't lie and that it serve The People in their need for accurate information instead of racist propaganda with incitement to kill. I don't believe that either the corporate, mass media and its champions in the free speech industry or the right wing that has adopted the slogans originated by them to destroy effective self-government by an informed electorate has any real belief in democracy, equality and the moral obligation to keep and protect it. They are worshipers of Mammon and those things don't come from that god, the patron of wealth and power and the blessing of its concentration. When the disaster comes, it will come from that direction, which is the equivalent in the American vernacular, which is the exact same thing that produces other forms in other societies with other languages and traditions and habits of expression. If we are going to prevent it, we have to destroy those idols and they are deeply embedded in contemporary thought as deeply as the fashionable slogans of "free press", "free speech" and "the Second Amendment". That realization that the first two were, for the ineffective substitute "left" that has brought us to complete impotence, the equivalent of the latter for those they have enabled was also an eye-opener for me.
* I think that the Supreme Court members are about as influenced by the Catholic Church as the Papal Knight of St. Gregory, the pornographer and promoter of fascism and violence, Rupert Murdoch is. The most rational explanation of their religion is that it is window dressing for the rubes as they all bow low to Mammon.
I think that the Supreme Court members are about as influenced by the Catholic Church as the Papal Knight of St. Gregory, the pornographer and promoter of fascism and violence, Rupert Murdoch is. The most rational explanation of their religion is that it is window dressing for the rubes as they all bow low to Mammon.
ReplyDeleteYup. Branches of the tree of evil, v. the roots, as Thoreau would say. Which is not to say the Roman church is evil, just that the problem lies far elsewhere than some condemnation of Opus Dei (whatever happened to them as the shibboleth, anyway) or the Vatican or the Jesuits (who were historically the whipping boy).
If I had the time I'd go back and look at how the Catholics in the Senate voted on their confirmation but these are busy days. Most of the Catholics I know are liberal to very liberal Democrats. I remember when the Republican attorney general of Rhode Island was a Catholic nun I remember hearing two nuns say, "She's a Catholic, how can she be a Republican?"
ReplyDeleteI would bet on any religious liberal not turning right-wing before I would an anti-religious one. Really believing that God is the author of inherent rights, equality and moral obligation tends to stick a bit more than something less definitive.